The notion of related items is broadly used in online publishing, shopping, travel, search, and in many other web services and applications. References to related articles may help news site visitors to expand their view of an original publication or topic; lists of related goods may lead online shoppers to better product choices. Overall, the notion of relatedness has had positive impact on web experiences and user productivity.
Since the proliferation of personal and shared content collections, such as Evernote notebooks supported by the Evernote service and software developed by Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., web and document clippings are finding and increased usage in everyday productive activities. As personal content items are accumulated in such content collections (for example, in Evernote notebooks), it becomes increasingly important to account for existing materials simultaneously with making new additions to the database; this requires identifying related items previously added to the database that can be associated with new materials.
Mechanisms have been developed to retrieve related items from individual and shared content collections every time a user clips a web page or a document, conducts an online search or looks for an item in individual or shared content collections, as described in U.S. Published Patent Application No. 2013/0318063-A1 titled: “RELATED NOTES AND MULTI-LAYER SEARCH IN PERSONAL AND SHARED CONTENT”, published on Nov. 28, 2013 by Ayzenshtat, et al. and incorporated by reference herein. These mechanisms take into account substantial differences between information in limited content collections accessible only by individuals, groups or organizations who have compiled the content collections, on the one hand, and social browsing history that is successfully used by search engines, e-commerce and news sites and other cloud-based services for identification of related items on public websites, on the other hand.
Contemporary work processes increasingly rely upon streams of online or local content delivered to user desktops and mobile devices. Examples of such content rich environment include news feeds, stock quotes, notifications about pre-scheduled meetings, and matching items on watch lists (goods, upcoming concerts or conferences and other items), etc. When properly delivered, displayed and used, such content streams may contribute to efficient work scheduling where attention span cycles are accounted for and productive work is mixed with periods of rest and consumption of general information.
Notwithstanding advances made in the development of personal and shared content management systems, mechanisms for identifying related items from personal and public content collections, and content streaming to user devices, an efficient use of content rich environments with external content still faces significant challenges:                A significant portion of content in personal and shared content collections may be created via direct user input; existing methods of retrieving related content items may not sufficiently address this dynamic content entry scenario.        In many existing applications, news feeds are delivered in their entirety or by categories (for example, by media sources and/or content aggregators) that may be set up and modified by users before any delivery is started and may not be dynamically adapted to user activities and may not have sufficient connotation with user-driven content creation process.        Streams of external cloud-based or organization bound content may be insufficiently connected with content authoring processes and may be underserving the productivity purpose. In particular, external and local content sources and clipping workflow may not always be adapted for immediate use in content creation processes.        
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a mechanism for enhancing user productivity during direct information entry into content collections and to include streams of news and other external information, to automatically generate and modify related news items, and to improve clipping processes.